This may seem like a stupid question but please bear with me. I just got a beer kit for my birthday and being somebody who wants to do things in an organized way I also would like to know what I need to have after brewing and all that stuff to keep my beer in good condition. Where do you usually keep your beer and at what temperature do you store it?

brewmeisterintng wrote:If your bottle conditioning your brew. Place it in a dark place around 70 degrees for a couple of weeks or more. Then you can keep it in the frig.

For the benefit of TipsyNot and any other new/beginning brewers, "bottle conditioning" means naturally carbonating your beer by having the yeast ferment priming sugar that you add immediately before bottling; just thought I'd add that extra info in case it will be helpful for newbies. Because the yeast need to ferment the priming sugar, it should be kept out of the refrigerator where the cold temperature will cause the yeast to flocculate (become dormant). My beers usually reach peak carbonation by a couple of weeks, and although it might just be psychological, it seems to me that my beer improves a little bit with age over the next couple of weeks after carbonation. So during the first three or four weeks, I keep them outside the refrigerator, and then after that I will put some in the frig 'ready for action' and the rest can be stored just about anywhere so long as they are not exposed to direct sunlight or flourescent light. While carbonating during the first week or so, I don't want them getting much above 75F, although getting warmer probably still won't matter too much because the percentage of sugar at that point probably isn't going to create substantial amounts of esters or fusels, but it doesn't hurt to play it safe. But after carbonation is finished, I don't think warm temps matter at all, so you can store them in the garage even where the temps might get as high as the 90-100F range. As for a "dark" place, I don't think yeast are affected by light, but you do need to worry about the hop compounds in your beer becoming converted to a foul-smelling skunkiness if exposed to _ULTRAVIOLET_ light; that means preferably using colored bottles (brown is best, then green), but most importantly not storing them where sunlight or flourescent light can hit them directly. I condition and store my beer at room temp on _open_ shelves in the house that never get any sunlight, and all is just fine.

Air-conditioning isn't going to hurt your beer, but your beer isn't going to get any colder than the air around it. I'm not sure what your question is. Some folks use a small air conditioning unit to cool a small insulated closet to drop the temp down pretty well, and they probably tinker with the thermostat, but I don't know how cold the closets get. They're probably just achieving 'celler temps' -- probably not much below 50F, but that would be a good temp for me to drink most of my beer.

TipsyNot wrote:Thanks for your replies. Just a follow-up question. What if you have a large quantity of beer and you'd like to keep it cool, do you think placing it in an airconditioned room is practical?

No reason to get too complicated over an issue like this; storing the beer is a cool dark corner of the basement will work fine.

Thanks again for all your replies guys! I am actually considering converting a spare room into a walk-in cooler. My brother-in-law who lives across the street and who's into beer brewing will store his stuff there too. He's the one who's going to do the renovation to convert the room into a walk-in cooler. He's actually the one who suggested it after coming across this website http://brewerycooling.com/

I'm interested to know if anybody here has tried this coolbot device. I would really appreciate your feedback. Thanks!

TipsyNot wrote:snip ... to convert the room into a walk-in cooler. He's actually the one who suggested it after coming across this website http://brewerycooling.com/ ... snip

Well, a small closet or tiny room cooled by an 'converted' window air conditioner ... (converted meaning a different thermostat) ... was exactly the option that I had mentioned; however, although I haven't had a chance to do an indepth reading of the entire website you cited, I'm not very impressed. Unless I'm mistaken, they aren't selling anything other than a thermostat, and they want $299.00 for it??? That seems WAY too high to me. Also, I think a lot of what they've got on their website is simply incorrect self-serving mis-information, or at the least some gross exaggeration -- all of which I would imagine is just so they can sell their product.

Example: "... One of the parts of the process that can be frustrating in making beer, however, is keeping the beer stored at the right temperature both during fermentation and bottling."

Yes, temperature is important during fermentation! ... But during bottling??? That's absurd. And very acceptable ale fermentation temps are easily attainable in any air conditioned modern home without refrigeration; if you want to lager, nearly everyone seems to be using converted chest freezers.

Example: "If beer is not cooled properly, and maintained at the proper temperatures, it runs the risk of infection which means that it all needs to be thrown out and the beer maker must start again." I've been brewing for over 10 years, have read a LOT about it, and I've NEVER heard "risk of infection" associated with temperatures. Proper sanitation takes care of the risk, and elevated temps cause esters and fusels, but as far as growth goes, the yeast will probably grow at an accelerated rate just as much as bacteria.

I don't want to rain on your parade, but in my opinion you need to do a lot more research before buying this product or using an entire room of your house as a walk-in cooler unless you have neighborhood drinking parties in your house every night.

We are distributors of the Coolbot which turns an insulated room into a walk-in cooler by using an air-conditioner. We are also lousy spellers

We wanted to explain a couple of things and (hopefully clarify as well).

The Coolbot was invented by a farmer to keep his produce cold. He first tried hooking a thermostat up to an a/c unit hoping to avoid having to buy a costly walk-in cooler. A thermostat DOES work, but only to a limited extent (like down to about 50 degrees). It also voids the warranty, but the larger problem is actually that if you try to go much lower than say 50 degrees, the front of the a/c unit quickly becomes a solid block of ice... and there's no way to predict when it's going to happen. It depends on the ambient temperature outside, the heat of what you are putting in, how often you are opening and closing the door etc. So you just end up setting it at a higher temperature than you really want (hoping) that it won't freeze up.

So he invented The CoolBot which has two sensors and a microcontroller making decisions about when to turn the compressor on and off. It does it without voiding the warranty on the air conditioner, and it allow your to access 90% of the BTU's of the air conditioner so you can keep the room down to 32 degrees without ever having any freeze-ups.

It also uses a LOT less electricity than a walk-in cooler does, not to mention the repair bills etc.

Once he made this for his farm, people asked him about having one for their farm so he started manufacturing them and selling them. THEN beer and wine makers and morticians (!) started asking if they could buy one too.

When he told me that people who make beer were requesting these, I said I would make a web site that would be specific to beer makers so it would be clear about how it could help in the production process and the storing process. I SHOULD have then called up the customers who bought it for beer and said "how was this helpful?" "how did you use it?" "why did you want this instead of some other option"? But I didn't...

And now I have lousy web content and people dissing the product in this forum

If anyone can help me fix the text I would really appreciate it. I hate the thought that we might been throwing lousy research up there and looking like idiots. I know that this Coolbot is better than slapping a thermostat onto an air-conditioner. It does much more than that, it really does make decisions and then takes actions. There is also a money back guarantee and no one has ever asked for that in fact everyone says it is a great solution (especially the morticians )

Thanks to Beertools.com and for all of you for starting this conversation.

That's cool, I build websites for a living too. It can be a challenge getting a high page rank on the search engines, especially as more and more sites go online. As you already know, link popularity is a criteria that is weighed heavily by some of the most important search sites. The more links to your site from external sites, the higher the rank for your site. For this reason, forums like ours receive a ton of spam posts designed to increase link popularity.

I asked you how you are connected with the product under discussion because it appears to me that your post is designed to increase search engine rank for the product and site being discussed. My suspicions are not intended to offend. Forum members have been quite clear about their disapproval of spam appearing on this site. The reason I have not deleted the post is because it does contain information that may be valuable to forum members. So I would like to leave it up to them to decide.

Does the post by "SiteOptimized" seem to be an attempt to use The Hop Vine forum as a platform for product advertising and search engine optimization? Or does the post seem to contribute to the content of the topic making it valuable enough to keep as part of the discussion?

Hi Jeff,
Thanks for your response. Site Optimized DOES provide search engine optimization but in this example the link that I provided is not even active so it is not an SEO strategy. Also forum links are really no longer considered to be of my much for SEO because the search engines understand how abused forums can be.
The purpose of my post was to clarify information about Coolbot and mostly to solicit help from the community to get my facts straight about the text on the web site.
-Doug

This is a tough one...I like when people post helpful links to potential solutions or cool things they've seen. That is certainly not spam. I cant stand when spammers post completely irrelevent links or inappropriate links.

This one is borderline. Some homebrewers may find it useful (although most homebrewers are either too cheap or too creative to buy a $300 thermostat....I fall in the cheap category)

We want real stuff on the forum...real questions...real answers. We dont want people starting fake topics to throw in links to their products so as not to appear as spam.